Introduction Whatever happened to the Black working class? In the 1980s the historian Ron Ramdin could, with a nod to E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class , publish his own classic, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain ( Ramdin, 1987 ). In the same period A. Sivanandan’s (1982) A Different Hunger , Peter Fryer’s (1984) Staying Power and Beverley Bryan et al’s (1985) The Heart of the Race all portrayed histories of Black working-class formation and political organisation in Britain. Yet today the working class is
Popular views of white working-class communities are common but knowledge of their views on multiculturalism and change less so. This important book provides the first substantial analysis of white working-class perspectives on themes of multiculturalism and change in the UK, creating an opportunity for these ‘silent voices’ to be heard. Based on over 200 interviews in multiple sites the results are startling - challenging politicians, policy makers and researchers. Improving our understanding of how this group went from ‘hero to zero’, became framed as racist, resistant to change and disconnected from politics, the book suggests a new and progressive agenda for white working class communities to become a fully inclusive part of a modern and diverse country in the 21st century. The book will be valuable to academics and students as well as policy-makers and practitioners in national government and organisations.
Introduction The foundation of this chapter is inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who spent his life exposing the unfairness and the damage that is done to society through a structured and structuring classified system. In The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society , an in-depth collection of case studies, Bourdieu ( 1999 ) pulls together the lived experience of working-class people from around the globe at the end of the last century. They also connect the logic and practice of people, groups and institutions purposefully
61 THREE White, working-class and racist? Introduction A popular theme in defining white working-class communities is that they have been in the vanguard of racism. This is usually linked to the perceived adverse impact of immigration in a number of areas, including national identity, public benefits (such as welfare or subsidised housing) and competition for meaningful employment. The narrative surrounding immigration has been fuelled further by the national interventions of politicians who have championed the slogan ‘British jobs for British workers’ or
11 2 Researching white working-class communities Coming to America Making a decision to undertake qualitative research in the US with white working-class communities was challenging, sometimes daunting, and often unpredictable. As researchers of long standing in the UK, we have undertaken various studies and community engagement projects focusing on race, class, community engagement, and disadvantage. Much of this research had included working directly with white working-class people in the UK or indirectly, for example, when working on the experiences of
Introduction Though graduates of UK universities have what is considered to be a life-long ‘graduate premium’ ( Kemp-King, 2016 ) consisting of higher earnings and increased potential for upward social mobility than non-graduates, this does not protect all graduates from hardship. This chapter examines the diversity in trajectories of recent graduates in the UK through exploring the narratives of 15 working-class women who graduated from their undergraduate courses in 2013. The analysis draws on a dataset of 79 semi-structured interviews conducted between
Key messages Crises of working-class social reproduction are normal and recurrent features of capitalist development, central to the mechanisms through which capital reproduces itself. Changing patterns in working-class strategies for social reproduction are always dependent on or determined by changes in capital accumulation. We are not witnessing a ‘capitalist crisis’, but a global crisis of working-class economic survival. Introduction Having corresponded over a number of years, the two authors present here, under equal joint authorship, a
Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic enforced periods of proximity for families and households, with impacts on their emotions and relationships ( Thomson, 2021 ). The broad aim of this article is to understand how members of Scottish working-class ‘households’ 2 emotionally navigated the enforced closeness of lockdown during the pandemic. While the concept of class remains slippery, participants self-identified as working class, but also broadly fitted within that category on the basis of Savage et al’s (2013) capitals, assets and resources (CAR
the country where the Industrial Revolution began – and, as E.P. Thompson chronicled, the English working class were made – the vertical class system that capitalism needs to function is in great shape. There has been a redistribution of wealth from the poorest upwards since 2010 ( ONS, 2021 ). The divisions between the rich and the poor both in the UK and in Europe have never been greater in modern times, and there is now a full body of work from academics studying economics, sociology, anthropology and urbanism, focusing on the elites and the ever-growing wealth
1 ONE Towards a definition of the white working class Rationale and aims of the book White working-class communities are commonly reduced to a negative rump most typically by media commentators, politicians and academics; an undifferentiated block who are welfare-dependent, leading chaotic and dysfunctional lives, and resolutely against social and economic change. Culturally, they are perceived as rooted in nostalgia for an idealised past that never existed, and, politically, they are viewed as unwavering supporters of racist political organisations that
